critical making: zines

I use zine-making as a DIY (do-it-yourself) tool to cultivate and extend the idea of “critical thinking” to “critical making.”

Zines—typically associated with small, hand-made, analog, low-cost, low-circulation publications—are literally unbound (traditional zines are often made from a single, folded sheet of paper) while metaphorically conveying a sense of unboundedness. Zines are vital forms of communication and community formation, and become “world-making” spaces for imagining future possibilities. Zines are not only or primarily spaces of self-expression, but they are also microcosms for cultural critique, memory, and counter-archiving for those lives and knowledges written out of official histories.

Jeanne Scheper, “Zine Pedagogies: Students as Critical Makers,“ Radical Teacher, no. 125 (Spring 2023): 20-32.

Recent Workshops:

Zine Workshop: Re-framing Bohemian Visions of the Arroyo Seco, 2023

Zine World-Making: healing, wisdom, & community archiving with Mx. Zhena Morillo, 2023

Zine-Making Feminist Worlds at Rising Bravely, 2022

Five principles that have informed my zine-making ethos:

how to make a zine

a few favorite resources for learning “how to” make a zine

• Asha Grant, Director of The Free Black Women’s Library – L.A. and founder of The Salt Eaters Bookshop, leads a virtual zine-making session inspired by Cauleen Smith (YouTube)
• how-to-make-this-very-zine is a zine that tells you “how to make a zine” by Anne Elizabeth Moore

zine archives

find digitized analog zines and digital zines

• Barnard Zine Library “We have zines by women, nonbinary people, and trans men, with a collection emphasis on zines by women of color and a newer effort to acquire more zines by trans women. We collect zines on feminism and femme identity by people of all genders.”
• DC Punk Archive Zine Library Zines “about (and often by members of) the DC music scene 1970s-present.”
• Calisphere You can use a gateway like Calisphere (digital collections from California’s libraries, archives, and museums) to search for “zines” among their 2,100,000+ items.
• Grrrl Zine Network: A global feminist zine inspired network.
• Library of Congress Zine Web Archive. The Library of Congress has a growing collection of zines. “The independent nature of these publications allows for an unprecedented freedom of expression, and as such, these materials are incredibly valuable primary source materials.”
• POC Zine Project “POC Zine Project’s mission is to makes ALL zines by POC (People of Color) easy to find, distribute and share.” (tumblr)
• QZAP (The Queer Zine Archive Project) “The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities.”
• Zines at the Sallie Bingham Center, Duke University.

Zine Librarians Code of Ethics

Zine Code of Ethics is a digital zine made by zine librarians which outlines a set of core values that inform and guide their work.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons “One goal of Creative Commons is to increase the amount of openly licensed creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing.” In addition to anti-copyright, creative commons licensing is another means by which to make your work available to share in a way “that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable.”